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Thursday, March 28, 2013

To no-one’s surprise the Ombudsman has found that John Banks, the
‘official’ champion of charter schools (yeah, right - another story), had
withheld information without valid reason, including:

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Groucho understands John Banks!

‘Charter schools would get money for set up costs and
property funding that their private-sector backers would be able to keep if a
school folded.’

Excuse me?Overseas corporates will get paid to set up
regimes to enable them to take profits from New Zealand children?Risk free and taxpayer funded? Warner Bros deal,
with added extras? Heard of the Robertson
Foundation?

“The Robertson Foundation is one of the new
breed of so-called ‘philanthrocapitalists’, private sector investment funds and
trusts that view charity not as altruistic giving, but as just another
business investment opportunity to influence government policy and the delivery
of public education. And, to do so by lobbying behind closed doors, completely
outside the democratic process.’ (John
Minto)

Ring any bells for
you?

However the underlying
issue isn’t so much as charter schools and shady deals, but the government’s
overall education agenda.

There is no problem
with New Zealand education, other than those imposed by politicians and the
unseen influences behind them.

One rule for the rich!!!

There wasn’t any
problem with New Zealand education in 1987 either, but then, as now, problems
were created - a standard disaster capitalism technique, through using or
creating a ‘crisis’ to justify privatisation.

National standards
have been, and still are, the government’s trump card in justifying ‘reform.’

It is vital to their
agenda that these standards are manipulated to show two things: New Zealand
schools have been failing to lift ‘achievement’ and that National’s policies
since 2009 have started to address this.

Over the last few
months a disturbing trend has become apparent. In order to explain this, it is
first necessary to review the national standards processes that are in
presently in place - apologies if the next section gets technical.

Readers may not be
aware that back in 1999, the then Minister of Education, Nick Smith, had
signalled, in a never-to-be forgotten and truly mind boggling rant at the NZEI
Annual Meeting, that national testing would be developed should National win
the 1999 election. Seems a mother he met at the local market had complained
about not knowing how her kids were doing at school…

Since National lost
the election, we were spared the testing regime, only for a variation to reappear
in 2009. Same agenda, different delivery.

This variation chose
to establish ‘national standards’ of achievement in literacy and numeracy for
all public school children commencing from the end of the first three years of
schooling, and for each level from year 4 onwards. It is has never been
explained why these have been deemed as not necessary for private schools and
now charter schools.

The very short time
frame for the development of national standards, combined with their dubious
educational value, resulted in considerable fall out in the Ministry of
Education. This led to the departures of many of the key people behind the
development of the New Zealand Curriculum, and, presumably, their replacement
by more compliant staff.

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Agree or I let you go!

Recent news about problems
within the Ministry is not surprising. Guess there’s a price to pay for
demanding adherence to politically imposed and educationally suspect policies.

Given the decision not
to test children, the government chose to require all classroom teachers to
‘assess’ each child’s achievement against relevant standards using their
‘overall teacher judgement,’ (OTJ) based on evidence collected over the year,
and comparing this with published exemplars - a very time consuming process.This process was not based on research
evidence and has resulted in ‘square peg in round hole’ syndrome that has left
New Zealand and international assessment experts rather bemused.

This syndrome has
resulted in two predictable problems:

Problem number one:
teachers are required to use their judgement (a necessarily subjective process)
to rate each child’s achievement for reporting purposes.

This leaves us to the
conundrum that teachers have to use a subjective judgement to get an objective
outcome.

Problem number two:
Since teacher judgements are subjective, then it is necessary for there to be a
moderation process, so teachers of similarly aged children in the same school
establish some level of consistency with their judgements. Several meetings
needed.

So far, so good, and
in fact these kind of moderation processes have been used in schools for many
years, although not overburdened by sheer volume of national standards.

But….. while teachers
of similar class levels can relatively easily moderate judgements, there also has
to be moderation with teachers of older and younger classes, so that there is
internal consistency throughout the school. More meetings.

Whew, after many
meetings, reviewing judgements in reading, writing and mathematics, each school
should now be satisfied that the national standards rankings for all children
are ‘accurate.’

Not so fast - how can
each school be certain that their internal rankings are consistent with
neighbouring schools? Or with schools across the country, in city or rural
areas?The impossibility of nationally
moderated should be obvious to all but the ideologically blind.

Or is this the case?
Are these ideologues really blind to the problems?

How have schools
tended to cope with the challenges, both with workload, and with moderation?

Many/most have fallen
back to pre-existing tests, developed for diagnostic, not ranking purposes, but
which do provide a basis for national comparisons.

STAR (Supplementary Test of Achievement in Reading) was developed by the New
Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) over a decade ago, and has
recently been upgraded.

Another test, e-asTTle
(electronic - assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning - an acronym that helps explain dazed looks in teachers’
eyes) is more recent, and provides foronline assessment of reading,
writing and mathematics.

Future articles will
explore the implications of online assessment and link this to some very
worrying developments in USA.

The third test, still
widely used, is one familiar to many who have long left primary schooling - the
Progressive Achievement Tests (P.A.T.).

This now means that a
national test programme is developing by default as schools strive to be as
accurate and fair as possible with the assessments of all children’s achievement,
and as an inevitable response to workload issues. Teachers don’t have time to
spend hours on OTJs and moderation meetings, preferring to put their efforts
into planning and teaching. Fair enough.

There’s a very big BUT
here. Towards the end of 2012 schools found that their students’ nationally
benchmarked scores on these tests had mysteriously jumped, so that the bulk of
children were now achieving relevant national standards. A principal of a lower
decile school has suddenly found that the majority of his school’s pupils were
now at the national standards in reading according to STAR results.

Two possible reasons
for this: the first being that all schools had now become extremely effective
due to the benefits of national standards, while the second, for the more
cynical ones amongst us, is that something untoward had happened to the tests.

And this has turned
out to be the case. The way test scores are normed has been changed for both
STAR and e-assTTle, so that children are now shown as achieving at a higher
level. Instant fix.

This then will reflect
on school’s national standards results that are submitted to the Ministry of
Education, and then published in league tables by the media.

This year’s results
will be submitted to the ministry in early 2014, will be available to the media
some months before the election and will inevitably be compared to previous
years’ results.Surprise, surprise,
national standards results will show that New Zealand schools are now much more
effective at raising achievement, just time for the election campaign.

Trust me !

Is that rat starting
to smell yet? There’s an even bigger and nastier rat in the cupboard - the
subject of the next article.

‘The
politicians want to free up the tests so certain actions by the review office
or by the Wellington bureaucrats can move the results up or down for advantage
in the election cycle.’

And;

﻿

Who would take advice from a failing minister?

“This is the Novopay of testing:
old reliables (for instance, PAT) have been distorted by the high stakes'
national standards environment; and now we have this colossal mess up with two
widely used literacy markers, and Parata calls this 'quality data'. We had
quality data, now we have the rubbish.”

One of life’s great mysteries is why a man
who made his fortune by through buying another company’s software (e.g. MS-DOS)
or ‘borrowing’ ideas from Apple (Windows) is now seen as an educational expert.

Australian Derek Hedgcock wrote this article
for The
Treehorn Express. While it’s focussed, on the first instance, on
Australia, there is so much of value for all teachers, and is a very powerful
rebutting of the Gates’ led nonsense about ‘teaching.’ If you only have time to
read one article from this week’s listing, this
is THE ONE.

‘ICOT 2013 keynote speaker Ewan McIntosh explains the
thinking processes used by many creative professionals and how these can create
dynamic and deeper thinking that will better equip students for their future.’

This is an excellent
video to watch - set aside an hour or so, and enjoy.

One particularly tiresome piece of jargon is
‘best practices.’When you really ponder
on this, you’ll realise it’s as empty as ‘raising achievement,’ ‘school
effectiveness’ and so on. Suggestion - every time you catch yourself using
these kind of phrases, consider them to see what they mean, if anything and ask
yourself why you’re using them?

Another chance to play ‘spot the
similarities.’ As most of the GERM agenda comes from USA, we all need to pay
close attention to events there, as we can be sure that variations will arrive
in our backyard before too long.

This is the first opportunity I’ve had to address a larger audience of education professionals since I formally took up the role as Labour’s Education spokesperson.

Up until now I’ve been out and about, listening to your views and concerns, and discussing how we can do things better.

The feedback I’ve had can be divided into two groups of thinking. One group asks questions like “why aren’t you sticking it to the government more?”, while the other asks “why are the Labour Party always so negative?”

So today I hope to prove that it is indeed possible to walk and chew gum at the same time by setting out some initial thinking on an alternative positive approach to education by Labour,whilst simultaneously but very positively spelling out the things the present government are doing wrong.

In the 1930s, Labour’s first Minister of Education, and subsequent Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Peter Fraser set out a vision for education that is as relevant today as it was then:

“The [Labour] government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their level of ability, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers.”

I’ve often wondered what Peter Fraser would make of some of the current debates that dominate the education agenda.

Peter Fraser

Would he accept, as the current National government seems to, that the success of our education system can be boiled down to national standards and NCEA level 2?

When he spoke of providing every citizen with an education of the kind for which they are best fitted, did he envisage a system where every child had to meet an arbitrary and narrowly focused set of standards?

I suspect he wouldn’t, given he subsequently stated:

“Schools that are to cater for the whole population must offer courses that are as rich and varied as are the needs and abilities of the children who enter them.”

And that highlights at the most fundamental level the difference in approach towards education taken by Labour and National.

We recognise that everybody is different, that children learn different things at different times, and that students are far more likely to be engaged in education if they are taught abroad and varied curriculum.

New Zealandhas one of the best education systems in the world, and our curriculum is widely recognised for its competency-based approach and for the flexibility it provides.
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Listening to just about any member of the current government speaking about education, it’s sometimes easy to forget that.

Rather than starting from the presumption that there is something inherently wrong with our education system and it needs to be ‘fixed’, I prefer to adopt the attitude that our challenge is taking a very good education system and making it even better.

Our first focus has to be rebuilding trust and redefining what success looks like.

Success in education is about making sure every child achieves their full potential.

Success means every school is a great school.

Success means we value great teachers.

And success means we recognise and celebrate diversity and difference.

I mentioned every school being a great school. I totally reject the notion that increasing competition between schools will lead to better outcomes for everyone.

National’s charter schools agenda will take resources away from public schools and channel them into private profit-making businesses.

Charter schools won’t have to employ registered teachers, won’t have to teach to our world-leading curriculum,and won’t be subject to the same accountability measures as public schools.

It’s ironic at a time when central government is imposing ever greater compliance burdens on public schools, and striving for ever greater degrees of ‘standardisation’, it is using those very constraints as reasons for adopting a new model of schooling provision.

Hekia Parata -failing

I’ve sat through hours of select committee hearings on charter schools and nothing has convinced me that the greater flexibility and focus on results the government seeks can’t be achieved if we resource and support our existing schools better.

So let me be very clear about Labour’s position on charter schools. We see no need for them. We see no place for them. And any charter schools established under the current National government will have no future under Labour.

Our focus will be on ensuring that every school is a great school.

I mentioned that success means we value great teachers.

Research here and around the world clearly shows that quality teaching has the greatest in-school influence on student achievement.

Quality teaching is more likely to happen in a collaborative educational environment than a competitive one.

Schools should collaborate,teachers should be part of collaborative professional networks, and the sink-or-swim mentality of Tomorrow’s Schools needs to change.

One of the most destructive things this government could do to quality education inNew Zealandis introduce so-called ‘performance pay’ based on a narrow range of student achievement measures.

If the alarm bells aren’t already ringing, they should be.

When the Treasury talks about setting “clear performance expectations” and in the same breath talks about increasingly “flexibility for principals to incentivize and reward effective practice by teachers” I automatically become suspicious.

Because what will those‘performance expectations’ involve?

You can bet your bottom dollar that National Standards will be part of the equation.

National Standards results are no measure of effective teaching.

National Standards narrow the focus of teaching, encouraging teachers and students to focus time and attention on getting students over an arbitrary hurdle, rather than supporting that child to achieve their full potential.

National Standards are being used to stereotype schools through league tables that don’t measure student progress, only the number of students jumping the hurdle at a particular time.

We need a much broader and more encompassing view of educational success than National Standards results.

Under Labour, we will work collaboratively with the education community to replace National Standards with something that is meaningful, broad, and that will work.

We recognise that parents want to know how their kids are going, but they’re just as interested in how their kids are doing in Art and PE as they are in reading and writing.

Parents also want to know how their kid’s social interactions are developing.

National standards tell them nothing about any of those things.

Parents are entitled to quality information,and by and large schools work really hard to make sure they get that.

But we also need to make sure that parents understand that league tables that aggregate a bunch of inconsistent data don’t provide any reliable basis for comparing the performance of schools.

And without a doubt, we need to recognise many of the out-of-school factors that influence student achievement.

When I asked Patrick Walsh at a select committee hearing recently what he thought the biggest thing the government could to lift student achievement was he replied implement a living wage. I nearly jumped for joy.

To quote another former Labour Prime Minister, Walter Nash:

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Walter Nash

“Men and women are not free to develop their own souls, to express their own individual personalities, to contribute according to their individual capacities to the world’s cultural inheritance – they are not free to do any of these things so long as the fact and fear of economic insecurity confronts them”